Authors

Mia Öhman¹;  ¹ University of Helsinki, Finland

Discussion

Malokartinye, the film famine of late Stalinism, has been considered as the result of stagnated rule over the production system, but in my paper I offer another explanation: modifying Soviet films to better suit Western audiences.

In 1945, Minister of Cinematography Ivan Bolshakov suggested intensifying the distribution of Soviet cinema and to widen the net of representative offices abroad. The Soviet Union had to start producing film copies and materials for export if it wanted to compete with the Americans and British on the European film market. The decision to reorganize film distributing agency Soyuzintorgkino into more effective Sovexportfilm was made on 28 December 1945. In the end of the year 1945, Soyuzintorgkino´s representative Pavel Petrovich Petrov-Bytov (1895–1960) arrived in Helsinki to analyze the situation of distributing Soviet cinema in Finland. The former Red Army Officer and NKVD representative was a filmmaker and editor himself, known for his abilities in artistic management and scriptwriting. Back in 1929, Petrov-Bytov had declared, that there actually was no Soviet cinematography, since films like Battleship Potyomkin by Eisenstein, Mother by Vsevolod Pudovkin and The New Babylon by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg were too complicated for ordinary Soviet workers or peasants. Petrov-Bytov suggested making films about topics which were close to the lives of ordinary people and thus understandable for the wide Soviet audiences.

On his Soyuzintorgkino/ Sovexportfilm mission in Finland Petrov-Bytov soon noticed that the films made for Soviet viewers did not appeal to Finnish audiences. In his 1946 letters from Helsinki to Sovexportfilm headquarters, he suggested a formula for making new Soviet films which would still have healthy communist values but could appeal to Western audiences as well. In 1958, Mikhail Kalatozov proved that a Soviet film could be awarded as the best at the Cannes film festival, when The Cranes Are Flying received a Golden Palm.

I argue that Sovexportfilm´s attempt to please the Western audiences affected Soviet film production in the late 1940s by adding a new thematic point to consider: if the same film was fitting for domestic and foreign audiences, it was worth having a bigger budget. This would better explain the effort of making less, but better films – with the extra qualification of being suitable for export. During the 1950s the world saw the new rise of Soviet cinema. Stalin´s death perhaps gave more space for creative ideas, but the attempt to produce Soviet films for export had been going on for years before that.

The proposed paper is based on archival documents from Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, collected before Russia´s 2022 attack on Ukraine, and published research and ma